


We Let Our Battles Choose Us

by labicheramure



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 04:09:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labicheramure/pseuds/labicheramure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You're a Titan too, stupid," Annie said. "That's why we took you away. You don't belong in the walls."</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Let Our Battles Choose Us

Annie made them come with her as she wove her way through the crowds of panicking, screaming people, holding each of their hands, her small body shoving against grown men like it was nothing. She said she knew what they were looking for, that it was in this city, that as soon as they found it they could go home and leave this awful place behind. It was the most sure and serious she has ever sounded about anything, and Reiner had shrugged at him as if that was enough for him to follow her anywhere. 

"W-what are we even looking for, Annie?" Bertholdt asked, using his greater strength to stop and root himself to the ground, yanking her little hand back, making her dig her nails into his knuckles. She scowled at him, impatient like she was when he wouldn't let her use him to climb trees. 

"A boy. Someone like us," she said, breathless. "Our age."

"How can we tell we have the right one?" Reiner asked, and Bertholdt saw in his eyes that he was thinking the same thing: Is there a way we're different from them? Can they tell?

"Father told me what to look for. Green eyes, and he's my age. That's all we need to know."

There were so many questions he could have asked; too many. He thought of the last time he looked in his mother's mirror, how wretchedly big he was becoming, and he thought, weren't my eyes green, then? And he knew that Annie's dad lived far away, and she only ever went to see him certain times of the year, but they had been told the coordinate had been in the walls for a very long time. Annie's dad must have seen him himself, Annie's dad must have been in the walls--

"There!" Reiner said. Annie hushed him, but she looked, watching a boy getting knocked around in the throngs of people trying to get on the boats, his eyes wide and bright and green, just like she said. He looked like he'd been crying. He looked like he couldn't find someone. Bertholdt watched as Reiner detached himself from Annie's arm, smiling in a copy of their parents, like he was so much older.

"Hey." He placed his arm on the boy's arm and he started, tense and ready to bolt. He wasn't calmed by the look on Reiner's face, not in the least. "You looking for somebody? Can we help you find them?" 

"Mikasa," the boy said miserably, a nonsense word that Bertholdt would later realize was a name. "Someone bumped into us and I lost her hand, and you can't hear anything in this crowd, I can't call her!" 

He was crying. He had been crying from the moment Reiner spoke to him, but he spoke so rough to begin with that it was hard to tell. Reiner faltered for a moment, giving Bertholdt a helpless look when he met his eye. He didn't know what exactly he expected him to do, but luckily he didn't have to. A second later Annie had the boy's hand clasped in her, was already dragging him away from the crowd, staring at him staid and serious in the way she did sometimes. Bertholdt had the urge to separate their hands, but he didn't know why. 

"We're gonna go high up," she said, when the boy's stubborn pulling at her arm finally got annoying. "So we can see over the crowd." 

"That's fine, just don't pull me so rough!" He said that, but he was still pulling, trying to pry her fingers off like an animal struggling in a trap. It made Bertholdt nervous, that vigilance, the caged restlessness in the way the boy looked around, as if mapping his escape. Around them, even as the crowd grew thinner, people knocked into him trying to run to the gate, the gate they were already closing, even though there were still whole throngs of them, waiting in the city. So many. It made him sick, thinking about it, about living and growing up in such a small place. Even drawing nearer to the spaces clear of people, he felt as if he was choking on the shared air. 

"Annie," he gasped, because there was only so much he could take, so much shouting and crying and, distantly, the rumbling thunder of a Titan's footsteps. "We've got enough space, do it now!" 

Reiner looked a little more uncertain, opened his mouth to say something until he caught Bertholdt, breath coming in big wheezes and gasps, like there wasn't enough air for him in the whole city. He felt him squeeze his hand, pleasantly warm, and he felt the invisible tension pulling at his muscles going slack, just a little.

"Hey, what have you got enough space for?" The boy was edging on hysterics as they stepped out onto an open boulevard, the silhouettes of wandering Titans towering clear over clusters of houses. Annie grabbed him by the shoulders to hold him still, looking up into his eyes again, just to be sure. "What-- Where are you guys taking me!"

"Home," said Annie, and then she was so close to the boy there was no difference between them, just a long fused shape of little boy and little girl that Bertholdt wanted nothing more than to rip apart. He only caught the glint of her ring before he was enveloped in searing steam, closing his eyes against it as Reiner stepped in front and shielded him a little. People were screaming, so loud, so awful. He was relieved when a huge hand scooped the two of them, pressing them in the hollow between the breasts he had always tried not to look at, not because they were ugly, they were just wrong, on Annie. 

He and Reiner clung blind to tendons as she sprinted across the city, not as graceful with another body pressed up against her in the nape. No one else was really meant to be there, they had said, but Annie said her dad told her it would work, and her dad knew more than the other grown ups, for some reason. Bertholdt closed his eyes as she made a long jump, the familiar unpleasant cold of motion sickness rising in his throat. Reiner grabbed his head and pressed it into Annie's skin, holding it still, and that stopped it only because he was distracted by the heat of her, burning into his cheeks.

He wasn't sure how long she ran, but Reiner said it was probably an hour and a half when she finally set them down in a cave she had to scale a cliff fave to get to, a place that no Titans could possibly find. They both collapsed and lay on the cool stone, their arms barely touching, watching water drip from a malformed stalagmite. 

"We did it," Bertholdt said, quietly, as if words would make the truth of it disappear. For some reason, Reiner laughed, rolling over to face him, smiling so big he thought he could swallow him.

"Yeah," he said, sitting up. "We really did. Let's go help Annie, before she yells at us."

Bertholdt didn't want to, didn't want to deal with the rude little boy again, but he swung himself up anyway, because Annie would yell at him. He could already see the plumes of steam erupting from her neck, turning Reiner's arms a bright, boiled red as he reached in and tried to pull open Annie's neck a little bit more. He didn't really need to, she was, among them, one of the best at getting out, but Reiner was Reiner and Reiner just had to help people out of their necks. And because he was a good boy, and he wanted to help Bertholdt did too.

Annie's hair was sticky-wet and and loose as she sat up, untangling her limbs from where connective tissue has fused her with the boy. He was still out, muscle stretched out from his eyes and his neck, a sign of her body's acceptance. Annie had told them about it, before, told them it was a test. Only someone like them could connect to their body like that. She looked weird, not like Annie at all, as she slowly and delicately ripped her flesh from him. Little lines of blood formed in the divots of his shifting marks, evaporating in red steam, something ugly and gross that Bertholdt hadn't seen before now. Reiner reached in and lifted him out, his head lolling on his shoulder like he was dead, but even sleeping he took these big deep breaths, like there wasn't enough air.

"Help me up," Annie ordered him, and he did, pulled her up gently, even as she made herself a dead weight in his arms. Her body was still unbearably warm, her sclera still a little dark, something that only happened to her, for some reason. 

"Ah," he said, because having dark eyes made her loud stares even scarier. "H-how are you feeling?"

He set her down because she was heavy, but he stayed close. She really didn't look like she was feeling well, but she nodded, looking somewhere just to the left of him, scowling as if her shifting sickness offended her. 

"I'm fine. Where's the coordinate?" 

"He's still sleeping." She pushed past him, impatient, ignoring him when he put a hand on her shoulder. "I think-- I don't think he's ever even partially transformed before. So he's worn out." 

Annie was stomping into the cave as if that information was completely irrelevant to her. Bertholdt couldn't do anything but follow, two steps behind her so she wouldn't complain about him breathing on her neck. 

"I think you're worn out too, Annie!" he said, lingering at the mouth of the cave. "You should lay down. For a while." 

"No," she said, standing over where Reiner had laid the boy out on his back, his marks still stark and red in the dim cave light. She poked his shoulder with her foot. "Wake him up so I can yell at him."

"Annie." Reiner spoke in his best grown-up voice. "You need to rest. You shifted for a long time."

"He bit me," Annie said, now having moved on to kicking him lightly in the ribs."He bit me on the face while we were in there."

"The face?" Something about that was indecent, Bertholdt decided. Really indecent.

"Like a dog." She had her foot on his stomach, slowly leaning on it, pressing it inward. Bertholdt wanted to stop her, because that was mean, but at the same time, he really didn't. "Hey dog, wake up!"

The boy woke up in a wild tangle of limbs, instinctively launching himself at the nearest target, in this case Reiner, because Annie was too fast. He tried to scratch his face, making weird noises like he really was a dog. Annie used the opportunity to kick him in the chest, sending him tumbling into an angry pile. Bertholdt watched as he sat up and caught his breath, rubbing at his eyes a little. 

"You guys are crazy," said the boy who had just tried to scratch someone's eyes out. "You--" His eyes widened as they fell on Annie, staring hard at him. "You're a Titan!"

Reiner was just close enough to catch his arms before he flew at her, crying for real now, but Bertholdt doubted that he noticed. 

"Yeah," Annie said, walking over to plop down cross-legged in front of him. "What else did you pick up? That the sky is blue?" 

"Annie, stop it!" 

Reiner was lucky he was big for his age. He could just barely wrangle the boy into a sitting position, and he had to sit on his feet just to make him stay put. Bertholdt felt like he should do something to help, but the boy was leaking snot and tears all over the place, yelling about killing like it was the only word he knew. 

"I'm not scared of you!" He was screaming into her face, all ugly and gross, but she just watched him, as if he was an interesting bug. "Gonna kill you all! I am!"

"N-no one's gonna kill anyone," said Bertholdt, but he knew he didn't even sound like he was convinced. "We're not gonna hurt you." 

"Yeah," said Reiner, and Bertholdt was grateful because he was so, so much better at this. "We're your friends, um... What's your name?"

"Eren Jaeger," he said, sullen in a way that seemed to mean he was getting tired. "I'm not gonna be friends with a big ugly Titan." 

"Annie's not ugly!" Bertholdt said, indignant without really knowing why. Eren ignored him.

"You're a Titan too, stupid," Annie said. "That's why we took you away. You don't belong in the walls." 

"You're crazy, you know that. You're just a really crazy Titan." 

She put her thumb against the fading lines under his eye, pressing in, pulling it away for him to see. He kept his eyes open, watched her without flinching, suddenly more curious than afraid. 

"You were bleeding earlier," she said. "And now you're not, there's barely any marks on you. Only we can heal that fast."

Eren was so tense it looked like he might crystallize in place, his shoulders shaking minutely. Reiner didn't even really have to hold him anymore; he was just frozen, his face terribly blank like the calm before the storm, the moment before someone shifted. Bertholdt had to fight a deep-set urge to pull Reiner and Annie out of the cave before something terrible happened. 

"You liar..." Eren said, but instead of exploding, he just sort of...fell apart, going limp so suddenly that Reiner had to catch his head before he hit it. When he lifted it up he could only see the whites of his eyes, rolled back in his head like he had lost consciousness too fast for them to keep up. His marks had incongruously returned, steam rising from them as if working to heal his exhaustion. 

"Is he okay?" he asked. Reiner nodded, laying him gently on his side, tension finally gone enough for him to almost look like a normal boy. Almost. 

"Stupid. Couldn't even tell that he was about to pass out."

Annie was standing up, brushing herself off as if this had all become very boring to her, now that their new charge had gone back to sleep. Bertholdt wanted to tell her not to leave; it was almost dark and he didn't want to get firewood by himself, but she was already gone by the time he could think of a way to say it. Reiner tried to smile at him, but it didn't look right, like he didn't really know what was wrong. That was fine, though. Bertholdt didn't expect him to. 

"Um. We should make a fire," he said, his eyes on Eren, hoping as hard as he could that he wouldn't wake up again. "We need to keep him warm."

"Yeah." Reiner seemed happy to have a distraction, something to think about other than the wild boy whose anger and strange on-and-off energy had shaken them all up so bad. Bertholdt was glad too, holding out his hand for him to take, relieved he wouldn't have to go traipsing through the brush on his own, a prime target if Annie got bored and decided to scare him.

"Ah, Bertholdt. You should stay here."

He felt himself wilting.

"Why?"

"You need to watch Eren," Reiner said. "That's an important job! And I know you don't really like going out when it's dark like this."

"But..." It was darker in the cave, he wanted to say. What if he wakes up? It's not that I don't like going out, I just don't wanna be alone.

But he didn't say any of that. Bertholdt was twelve now, a real warrior, someone who wasn't supposed to be afraid of the dark, or loneliness, or shifters who didn't even know how to shift. Reiner clapped him on the shoulder, his form nearly black against the faint sunset light as he set off into the brush. 

Bertholdt waited for what felt like a long time. Setting out from that same cave this morning seemed like something that happened yesterday, maybe even a week ago. Shifting had never felt as right to him as it had for Annie, but today was more like a long, bad dream, the kinds he had in the days and weeks before coming to the walls, so afraid that he wasn't strong enough, that he couldn't do it. Now, though, the sunset was taking hours, and so were Reiner and Annie, wandering around, unafraid of the dark, as always.

"Hey." 

The boy's hand was curled weakly around his wrist, fevered in the way their skin got, after shifting. His eyes were unfocused, looking in Bertholdt's direction as if he saw something else there. The Colossal Titan, he thought suddenly, feeling horribly sick.

"Aren't you tired?" he asked, not as nice as he should have been, but no one was here and this stupid boy wouldn't stay asleep. "You should go back to sleep, you're gonna hurt yourself."

"I was just thinking," Eren said, more quiet than he'd been this whole day. "Are we outside the walls right now?"

"I...guess. Yeah, we are."

"You guess?" He said it like he was stupid, but Bertholdt hadn't thought of things in terms of walls, not until today. "What's it like?"

"I don't know." Eren's eyes were bright, like he expected him to say something really big and important. "There are...a lot less people?"

"And more Titans?"

"No!" Bertholdt said emphatically. "Where we live, they can't get to us. Not as often. It's too high up."

"Oh."

Eren moved like he was trying to sit up, but he was still so weak that all he could do was roll over on his back. Sweat beaded heavy on his forehead, his eyes focused on the ceiling, trying to puzzle it out. Gently, nervously, Bertholdt tried to pry his hand off his wrist, but he wouldn't let go.

"What are you-- ?"

"Are you like her?" he asked. "Are you a Titan too?"

"No." Bertholdt swallowed, near choking on his answer. To his horror, Eren smiled.

"Good, you'll help me fight her then, right?"

"Annie isn't bad... She's just mean, sometimes. She's, um, she's not gonna eat you, or anything." 

He regretted that word, eat, as soon as it left his mouth. It seemed to hit Eren like something physical, made him double over, pulling Bertholdt down with him, welling tears making the tops of his shifting marks red all over again. It was different from the crying he'd done before, the childish tantrum borne from exhaustion that was gone as soon as it came. This was something that had been building for a long time, a quiet crumpling into despair that made him rub his wet, overheated face against Bertholdt's sleeves in place of anything else to comfort him.

"I didn't mean-- I'm sorry!" he said desperately, trying to pull himself out of Eren's vice grip, guilty but not, because there was nothing, not Annie, not the crowds, scarier than this; this mercurial, too-strong boy, who felt so much in every direction, who broke down in front of strangers who had abducted him and threatened them without seeing any contradiction whatsoever. It was as if he liked hurting, like he thought it gave him strength, and the thing that scared Bertholdt the most was the thought that he might be right.

Eren sniffed, quiet, pulling his arm into his chest like the stuffed rabbit he used to curl around at night. Bertholdt gave a few more halfhearted tugs at it, then went limp, suddenly tired, even as he winced in visceral discomfort at the way Eren's marks scraped hot against his wrist. Either Reiner or Annie had to come soon, and then it wouldn't be dark anymore, and he could sleep at the opposite end of the cave. 

"No, it's-- " Eren hiccuped, pulling distractedly at stray threads in his sleeve. "'S'not your fault. My mama, this morning, one of them-- "

His voice cracked, dissolving into these little high-pitched sobs that sounded like they were hurting him. Slowly, fearfully, Bertholdt curled his hand around his wrist, thumb pressed into the spot where he could feel his heartbeat, faint among the tremors in his chest. 

"Our house, it's kinda near the gate." No. You don't have to tell me anymore, he wanted to say, dread spilling up in his throat. "And a piece of it fell on there. On her. I wanted to save her so bad, but her legs were already broken, and I wasn't-- I couldn't-- "

"It's okay," Bertholdt found himself murmuring, but it wasn't, wouldn't ever be again, probably. He stroked his hair like his own mother had done so many times before, and realized, with nothing but a dull twinge of hate, just what a horrible person he was. "Y-you're gonna be okay."

Eren whimpered gratefully, made him feel like dying, but he still held on to him, watched his face until all the little lines on it were gone, until he wasn't a monster in a way that anyone but Bertholdt could see. It was the least he could do, he thought.


End file.
